Who are THE OLD ONES?

Lurking in the background of every story in Tales of the Quantum Corps is an entity or race known as the Old Ones.  In fact, as we learn late in this series, it’s actually this extraterrestrial race who are in charge of the criminal cartel Red Hammer.  And they’re using the cartel for purposes that go far beyond just conducting criminal enterprises.

The Old Ones are sometimes referred to as the Mother Swarm or the Central Entity.  Config (Zero) is a subset of the Old Ones and has multiple physical locations.  The original program is archived with the Old Ones, some sixty-eight thousand light years away on the homeship (swarmship) of the Old Ones, in the globular cluster M75 in the constellation Sagittarius.  At the time of the Tales of the Quantum Corps, the Old Ones have mostly left their homeworld in a diaspora across their star region, due to the supernova destruction of their home star.  Config (Zero) is located in the mobile archives that travel with the mother Swarm.  The Old Ones are basically a nomadic mechanistic species now, a great swarm thousands of light-years across, traveling through interstellar space around the galaxy.

The Old Ones have spent millions of years seeding and developing life on other worlds.  Each time they do this, the Old Ones seed life to ensure that it evolves in a manner compatible with them…evolving as a distributed, intelligent virus-like swarm of entities.  The Old Ones are using this seeding campaign as a way of developing multiple swarm entities with which they can merge.  They are trying to re-create multiple copies of their home world.  Ultimately, they want to unite all world-based instances of swarm life which they have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind (like a network or computational cloud).  To the Old Ones, this is the Imperative of Life itself.  The Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or builds structure or order.  Life is anti-entropic. 

“The basic organizing influence in the universe is life. Life involves the utilization of a flow of energy to draw order from chaos and build internal complexity with an accumulation of information. Living beings thus are anti-entropic, or negentropic, entities. The principle of negentropism is, in a manner of speaking, the "natural law" applicable to all living (matter-energy) beings located anywhere in the universe, regardless of their size, shape, biochemistry, sentience, or culture.” (from Xenology, (c: 2008)  Robert A. Freitas, Jr. )

Earth was seeded by the Old Ones three billion years ago.  But the evolutionary track which the Old Ones laid down on Earth was interrupted or disrupted and evolution took a different course.  Multi-cellular (single-configuration) organisms took over.  Earth was to have been populated by swarms of intelligent, re-configurable virus-like entities.  Instead, it’s populated by human beings.  Man is a mistake.

The Old Ones mean to correct this mistake.  The Imperative demands this. 

In the early 22nd century, by human time reckoning, the Old Ones have sent advance scouts ahead to reconnoiter the Earth and its solar system.  After the initial Seeding some 3 billion years ago, the Old Ones left behind a Keeper unit buried in the frozen seas below the ice crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa.  Satellite Keeper units were also located on Earth and Mars, but the Europa Keeper is the primary sentinel.  Config Zero is an Earth-based node of the Central Entity (the main processor or operating system of the Old Ones) created and controlled by the Keeper. 

The Keeper uses Config Zero to execute the commands, directives and intentions of the Old Ones in this solar system.  These directives are codified in something called the Prime Key.  These directives, in the form of the Prime Key, were embedded in the ‘genome’ of the earliest seeded lifeforms on Earth.  When Dr. Irwin Frost took elements of an ancient virus and used it to solve some programming problems he was having with early forms of ANAD, he unwittingly endowed ANAD with the Prime Key, in other words with the earliest directives from the Old Ones.  The result is that ANAD has followed (and is trying to follow) the originally programmed sequence of development intended by the Old Ones for all lifeforms on Earth.  This deeply embedded programming is often at odds with what Dr. Frost and Humanity in general want from their nanobotic creations. 

Because they are a nomadic swarm species and are spread out across tens of thousands of light years in this galaxy, and because the Old Ones are a true distributed intelligence, it is meaningless to ask where the Old Ones are located.  ‘They’ are located everywhere the swarm exists, everywhere multiple copies of the nanobotic devices endowed with the quantum-scale processors are located.  The original home world was located some 68,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, in the globular cluster M75. 

By the time of Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone, early 22nd century, elements of the Mother Swarm have reached 51 Pegasi and have begun disassembling planets and satellites in that planetary system.  The effects of this activity have been observed by humans at Farside Observatory on the Moon.   There are also some elements of the Mother Swarm that have made it to the outer reaches of our solar system. 

How can the entire Mother Swarm stay in communication with itself, across such vast reaches of space?  Through an advanced form of quantum communication, using entanglement states of quantized systems…a very advanced form of quantum coupler.  Light speed and galactic-scale distances are not an obstacle to communication with the Old Ones.  They manipulate quantum states of the subscale fine structure of space itself to communicate.  This manipulation also allows them to achieve faster-than-light speed travel as well.  They are able to manipulate quantum states of the substructure of space to transmit configuration data about themselves and their civilization to anywhere in the Universe, nearly instantaneously.

The ultimate goal of the Old Ones is for the entire universe to become one being. 

What do the Old Ones intend to do when their forward elements reach our solar system?  In four words: Execute the Prime Key.  Extinction.  Re-configuration.  Evolution.  Integration.

Their first phase will be to purge Earth of all non-Prime Key lifeforms…pretty much all life and living systems.  The preferred way would be to disassemble all lifeforms into their constituent atoms and molecules.  A form of mass Assimilation, starting with deconstruction. This is the rationale behind Symborg and the philosophy of Assimilationism, created, aided and abetted by Config Zero. (This is detailed in Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma, Johnny Winger and the Golden Horde and Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone).

Once this purge is finished, the next step would be to re-engineer the Earth’s surface to be more compatible with swarm-based life...the oceans will be eliminated and all the Earth’s surface will ‘locked’ into a geologically stable state, providing maximum surface area for swarm activity and growth.  Also, the stable point temperature of the Earth will be raised…an enforced climatic change similar to what Humans are doing now on the Earth, unwittingly helping the Old Ones along.  This provides a consistent environment conducive to swarm growth and activity.  The Earth becomes, in effect, an incubator or giant Petri dish, to incubate this new kind of life.  (detailed in Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary) (circa 2120 AD).  In this episode, Johnny Winger agrees to allow himself to be de-constructed into a swarm entity, to better do battle with the Old Ones who are coming. 

Coincident with geoengineering the Earth’s surface, new forms of life, initially similar to early ANAD, similar to ancient virus entities, will be seeded and allowed to evolve at the maximum permissible rate consistent with these environmental changes.  This will help bring Earth life up to the development level of the Mother Swarm, in terms of architecture, processing capability, memory, quantum comm links, and overall programming. 

The final phase is Integration.  Re-evolved Earth life forms will be fully absorbed into the Mother Swarm.  Once this process is done, the Earth and all planetary objects in the Solar System will be disassembled to provide feedstock for the Mother Swarm, to continue its advance across the galaxy.  In other words, the Petri dish is destroyed and the lab/incubator shut down.  The Imperative drives the Mother Swarm onward.  The swarm entity (angel) Johnny Winger will rise to do battle with the Old Ones as they enter the Solar System and encamp on and around Mercury, with the intention of using the Sun for energy to begin their disassembly of the solar system.  (detailed in Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin) (circa 2155 AD)

Once the goals of the Old Ones become clear, Mankind knows he must confront this swarm species and defend Earth and the solar system to survive.  It is through Rene Winger, angel swarm daughter of Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant, that the true intentions of the Old Ones become known.  Rene somehow becomes a form of conduit or channel, able to eavesdrop on quantum signals from Config Zero and the Keeper and from the Keeper to the Mother Swarm.  She becomes an intel source for Quantum Corps.  A rare permutation in her ‘evolution’ as a swarm being makes this possible. 

This is the background to Tales of the Quantum Corps.  The encounter between Mankind and the Old Ones is destined to be a violent one. 

The next post to Quantum Corps Times comes on April 1, 2017.

See you then.

Phil B.